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What Is in a Step: New Perspectives on a Classical Question

  • Chapter
Time for Verification

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6200))

Abstract

In their seminal 1991 paper “What is in a Step: On the Semantics of Statecharts”, Pnueli and Shalev showed how, in the presence of global consistency and while observing causality, the synchronous language Statecharts can be given coinciding operational and declarative step semantics. Over the past decade, this semantics has been supplemented with order-theoretic, denotational, axiomatic and game-theoretic characterisations, thus revealing itself as a rather canonical interpretation of the synchrony hypothesis.

In this paper, we survey these characterisations and use them to emphasise the close but not widely known relations of Statecharts to the synchronous language Esterel and to the field of logic programming. Additionally, we highlight some early reminiscences on Amir Pnueli’s contributions to characterise the semantics of Statecharts.

The initial ideas leading to this paper were developed by the authors during the Dagstuhl Seminar 09481 (Synchron 2009) in November 2009.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel, Germany

    Willem-Paul de Roever

  2. Software Technologies and Informatics Theory Research Groups, Otto-Friedrich-University of Bamberg, Germany

    Gerald Lüttgen & Michael Mendler

Authors
  1. Willem-Paul de Roever
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  2. Gerald Lüttgen
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  3. Michael Mendler
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, Stanford University, 94305, Stanford, CA, USA

    Zohar Manna

  2. Department of Computer Science, Bar Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Doron A. Peled

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de Roever, WP., Lüttgen, G., Mendler, M. (2010). What Is in a Step: New Perspectives on a Classical Question. In: Manna, Z., Peled, D.A. (eds) Time for Verification. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6200. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13754-9_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-13754-9_15

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-13753-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-13754-9

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